3 groovy tunes…
Update: something is going haywire with posting YouTube…I’ll fix it in a bit
I’ve been meaning to mix it up around here…these tunes are most excellent, maybe I should release a mix for you all. Till I do you can find the tunes on hypemachine
This song is just seductive enough…
Sorry for making you jump, but apparently someone doesn’t understand that it is a GOOD idea to embed. Yes, I’ve always dug Lily Allen.
And this song just puts a smile on my face, makes me want to dance just a little…
2 other tunes/mp3 blogs I highly suggest you check out this evening -
Trend ‘07, maturing of social media ROI discussion
I think one of the main “trends” of 2007 was the maturing of the discussion/idea of social media and the relationship it has with business/consumer (person)/brand. I’ve been reading some great ROI discussions that really illustrate how far the strategic thinking has come. I’m going to kid myself and say that over the holiday break I’m going to try and gather as many of these good thoughts and put them into a great client slideshare…but we all know that it is a very lofty holiday goal.
Additional suggested reading (besides from my last social media ROI round post), ROI and what it can achieve -
Stepping back from tactics, what are we going to achieve? What will we effect? Earlier this year Tom from WME Blogs post Extending Forrester’s Blog ROI matrix explores benefit, metric value. I wish I would have seen this earlier, it would have helped with the question I was getting time and time again - why does social media matter again? A article from iMedia Connection: Keys to social media pairs with this to help start thinking how getting your plan going. Along similar lines is 7 Idea for Social Media and Business from Patrick Schaber at the Lonely Marketer. And for those clients/bosses who need it more black and white, Emergence Marketing does a great job laying it down to bare bones, ex:
The Viral Garden has another post I’m thinking I should just spam my office with, understanding the value of blogging. While it does get into Google Page Rank and other analytics, the most important part is that while numbers are nice - consumers are into conversations and we need to understand what value blogs bring as a community building tool. Laddering up, its not about being stone face company anymore - need to start living and breathing, need to start “communicating”.
But to put some real “numbers” to social media, Tom from MotiveQuest is working with Northwestern University to develop an Online Promoter Score. I think we’ll see more more tools like this in the near future. I like this idea of the Online Promoter score…but I wonder what is under the hood. I know from other studies last year social media and brand engagement were having a hard time correlating to market share and sales because of ‘chicken/egg’. Does sales lead to more social media/brand engagement or do social media/brand engagement lead to more sales? And is it strictly social media/brand engagement or was it a really good online marketing program, SEO program and offline promotion that drove chatter? (And honestly, I’m not sure we really should be separating chicken/egg).
Moving forward into 2008, I really see a breaking out of social media campaigns (if not happening already). I think the tipping point is just about here - broadband adoption(eMarketer.com), social media consumer usage(eMarketer.com), smart thinking on social media (Jeremiah Owyang). I mean if my mother found a blog...yours will too. What is making me nervous is when a blogging/wiki/flickr/social network gets mashed and dumbed down enough (no offense mother) for even my mother to use(eMarkerter.com). This social media thing might really take off…
Little social media ROI roundup
Another post escapes my agency firewall (I blog several places)
Several people have been asking/chatting about Social Media ROI lately so I thought I would pull together some quick stats and links on the topic. To sum up, nobody has really broken the code and has been able to equate a number (impressions…yuck) to Social Media or WOM. And honestly, how could you/why should you.
I’m not sure I want to know a X value on my friendship and what we talk about. More so to the point, the age of conversation and how we measure don’t fit the old paradigms. Impressions, page views, etc are all built on a broadcast reach/frequency paradigm. For social media and WOM, we need to start thinking in what a conversation/engagement really mean to us (marketers/company/brand) and what that means to a consumer (real people). But here are some links to get going on the topic.
Online Communities and ROI
From a recent Online Community Business Forum, Joe Cothrel and Bill Johnston presented Online Community ROI
Community users remain customers 50% longer than non-community users. (AT&T, 2002)
- 43% of support forums visits are in lieu of opening up a support case. (Cisco, 2004).
- Community users spend 54% more than non-community users (EBay, 2006)
- In customer support, live interaction costs 87% more per transaction on average than forums and other web self-service options. (ASP, 2002)
- Cost per interaction in customers support averages $12 via the contact center versus $0.25 via self-service options. (Forrester, 2006)
- Community users visit nine times more often than non-community users (McKInsey, 2000).
- Community users have four times as many page views as non-community users (McKInsey, 2000).
- 56% percent of online community members log in once a day or more (Annenberg, 2007)
- Customers report good experiences in forums more than twice as often as they do via calls or mail. (Jupiter, 2006)
From the Forum One OC ROI Survey (April 2007):
- Only 22% of respondents had clear ROI Model
- 42% had staff of 1-5 people
- 49% Report Monthly to Mgmt
- Establishing ROI Model was a priority for most respondents in the near term
Blogging ROI
Forrester has an ROI of blogging report...might be good to track down.
Marketing ROI: Whims from Ron Shevlin has a great post digging the report. From his post -
GM’s first-year ROI on the blog was 99%. The primary contributors to the top line: 1) $180,000 in customer insight, which was estimated by assuming a cost of $15,000 for running a monthly focus group with 10 participants over the course of a year, and 2) $380,000 in press coverage, calculated by estimating the value of “high-visibility Web placements” and the cost of CPM advertising on sites like InformationWeek.
Social Media ROI
From the blogosphere, some must read on the topic -
Connie Bensen My Conversation Blog - was tagged in an ongoing pass along ROI discussion. Her post digs into both quantitative and qualitative variables on ROI measurement.
Rohit Barghava Influential Marketing Blog Guest Post: Is Word of Mouth a Discipline or Just a Channel? - Tackles some core issues of WOM
Brains on Fire - “As the engagement and involvement of your community – your passionate fans – increases, the less money you need” Awesome!
Conversation Agent ROI = Return on Involvement This is required reading!
Update: fixed Conversation Agent link. And here is another suggested link from Conversation Agent - Measurement and ROI for Social Media
(thanks Valeria for stopping by!!!)
Hate on Facebook
Just a quick note. Seems there has been some unrest in the blogosphere over Facebook. A bit disturbing to me as well.
First off is Cory Doctorow post on How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook. It touches on something I felt for awhile. Do I HAVE to friend you? Even if we are just work mutual friends? It worth the read and a good think.
Next up is Facebook’s Beacon. Matt Dickman does an excellent job breaking down what Beacon is and why it matters to marketers. I had been noticing this when somehow magically Facebook posted some recipes from epicurious.com. I didn’t notice it at first, but then it got kind of creepy. The Idea Shower (which I’m adding this blog to a regular reading list) does a great job explaining the situations behind Beacon and privacy issues.
Thing is, I agree with what these post share. Facebook is kind of overstepping its bounds for my taste. The ad guy in me wants data shared, really. But within good taste. On top of that, while I like Facebook, it really just doesn’t do it for me. I’m glad its there, but I kind of want to keep it at arms reach. I mean, I like being able to keep up with my friends. But…I kind of like being able to disappear from the social scenes every now and then as well.
Latest advertising death: Campaign Microsite
(This post sneaks out from behind my agency’s blogwall)
The latest article from Adweek Magazine, Is Social Media Killing the Campaign Microsite?, questions the death of the Campaign Microsite. Adweek likens this to the death of the 30-sec spot discussion from several years (or wait, months ago?), but instead of media fragmentation killing the :30, its social media killing the microsite.
Now, lets step aside the B.S.O.S hysteria (bright and shinny object syndrome, see slide #10) for just a second and get into the guts of the article. This is still about media fragmentation and consumers wanting control…just in the online space. Consumer go and find and use content, including brand content, how they want. So trying to create a site and just drive them there…may not be the answer. As Carol Kruse, vp of global interactive marketing at Coca-Cola points out in the article “fish where the fish are” - if you consumers are into social media, get there…which means, widgets, Facebook, etc. So this isn’t about killing the microsite, but understanding the functionality of content for consumers. We need to focus on creating brand that consumers can use increasing the functionality and experiencability, less about driving consumers (people) to a place.
And it’s not just the Adweek article that is discussing this idea. From the latest ad:tech conference the panel ‘Appointment Marketing, Consumers Check In‘ discuss emerging audiences and how to follow them. A couple of interesting points came out of the panel.
First - that consumers are choosing where and when to engage online (media fragmentation), so when need to start understanding what roles of engagement a brand should play.
Second - start thinking about a better understanding of what to deliver to for the consumer will help with both engagement and ROI. Both types of ROI - Return on Investment and Return on Involvement (this gets into a larger discussion on audience back planning…will save that for another day).
Third - maybe, just maybe what media fragmentation has done is forced a new/better/return to a different understanding of advertising and brand/branding; what is the function on the brand idea.
While the Adweek article doesn’t specifically touch on this…it does start to elude to it. That it really is about the consumer experience, what the consumer takes away - which some would argue equals brand. So it is about the brand idea reaching people, with out the worries of the specific media (media fragmentation…again). The adliterate even goes one step further and throws out the idea that branding may be shackling advertising, because advertising is built on specific forms of communication ideas (traditionally) and that the digital space removes those binding forms and allows for the brand idea to engage in any way it wants…helping kill the idea that everything should just be about the microsite.
Now, in all fairness - the microsite doesn’t completely go away. The key is understanding what function consumers want with content and how the brand idea enhances their experience. How a microsite could help pull all of that together.
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